How to set up BigCommerce Dynamic Remarketing (Google AdWords)

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Product Adverts that follow your Visitors

Dynamic Remarketing combines several Google Ads (Formerly AdWords) systems resulting in a powerful and
mostly automated advertising campaign. Adverts target people who have previously
shown interest in your products by placing ads for those products on the website
they subsequently visit.

This means Dynamic Remarketing is one of the most complex Google Ads campaigns to get
going. It requires a Merchant Centre Shopping feed and Remarketing tags to be set
up, plus page specific code to identify what a visitor has looked at.

Google Ads have now release a new Smart Shopping Campaign type that takes the Dynamic Remarketing to a new level using more machine learning. These Smart Shopping Campaigns will work better when the Dynamic Remarketing code is properly implemented.

This article goes through the steps I followed to successfully set up BigCommerce based Dynamic Remarketing campaigns using the older AdWords custom tagging system. If you are still using the older tags (not gtag) then this should work for you.

We offer several BigCommerce SEO and SEM Packages which includes a BigCommerce Dynamic Remarketing package for setting this up. We also have a complete Dynamic Remarketing solution for Stencil themes that use the new gtag.js code as recommended by Google Ads.

Have an Google Ads account

Obviously this process requires you to have an Google Ads account. If you don't yet
have one then go to
Google Ads
and create one. If you have a new account and are from Australia then contact me
for a $100 coupon.

Set up a Shopping Campaign

BigCommerce provides instructions for
Google Shopping. At this time they don't provide direct support, and a third party BigCommerce Google Shopping app is requered. Once you have completed those steps you will need to link the Merchant Account
with your Google Ads account:

In the Merchant Center go to Settings->Google Ads (steps 1 & 2). Hopefully
you should see your Google Ads account listed and the option to Link Account
(step 3). If that option is not available then find your Google Ads customer id (top
right in Google Ads) and use the Link Another Account option.

You are now able to create Shopping Campaigns in Google Ads. These are the product
ads with photos that show up in the Google Search Results. A very powerful way to
advertise.

Set up Google Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing

In Google Ads go to Shared Library->Audiences. Here you should see an option
to set up dynamic remarketing. If you don't have that option it probably
means remarketing has already been set up. You can skip to the next section.

When you click the button you should see some instructions for tagging the site.
If not, you may not have the Merchant account linked correctly.

You will be asked if you want to use the Google Analytics tag instead of the Google Ads
remarketing tag. I suggest you stick with the Google Ads tag which is the path these
instructions follow.

Enter your email address and click Send and Continue.

Google Ads will create some automated Remarketing lists for you. Continue clicking the buttons
until you are back at the Google Ads main page and can see the remarketing lists.

Getting the Dynamic Remarketing Tag

We now need to add the tags required to enable Remarketing, as well as pass the information
required to enable Dynamic Remarketing.

Follow these steps to get hold of the sample code we need. The
video to the right will help:

Ensure you on the Shared Library->Audiences page

Click on the View tag details button (top right)

Click on the Setup option in the dialog

Expand the instructions

Copy the code so we can refer to it later

Adding the Remarketing Tag

The lower part of the code you just captured should be included like this, using your
own ids. Note that I have added an extra script that makes sure all pages set the google_tag_params.

cart.html

Add the following code just before the %%Panel.Footer%% line. You will need to alter that code if you don't use a dot (.) as a decimal point. Replace the dot in [0-9. ] with whatever decimal point character you use.

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